Pages

Learn to live each day to the fullest by enhancing mental, physical, and spiritual healing as well as overall wellness. Discover how to strengthen your immune system, reduce stress and anxiety, and foster hope and spiritual growth. Be inspired by the stories of people who have not just survived, but have thrived, while finding meaning and purpose within challenging situations. It’s time for hope to return and healing to begin. Join us.

“Hope, Healing and WellBeing” is dedicated to helping you live each day to the fullest by enhancing mental, physical, and spiritual healing and overall wellbeing. Learn new skills and coping techniques to develop effective self-care practices for yourself and others. Discover how to strengthen your immune system, reduce stress and anxiety, and foster hope and spiritual growth in your life. Gain insight from highly regarded professionals from the field of integrative medicine, including physicians, therapists, holistic practitioners, best-selling authors and others. Be inspired by the stories of people who have not just survived, but have thrived, while finding meaning and purpose within challenging situations. Join us each week and become “well within.” Hosted by Mary Treacy O’Keefe.

David Emerald is the author of TED: The Empowerment Dynamic for Diabetes. David explains the concept of TED: The Empowerment Dynamic which comes out of his work with leadership within various organizations. Three basic questions can answered by TED: What do you put your focus on, problems or outcomes? How do you relate, to others, experiences and yourself? What kind of actions do you take, reacting to problems or do you choose how to respond to life’s circumstances?

Regarding how to relate to others and to various events, he explains the “dreaded drama triangle.” Within it, a person can decide if they want to be a victim of circumstances, a perpetrator or the rescuer within different circumstances. Rather than just reacting, one can choose to be a “creator” when we ask “how can this (person, event, circumstance) enable me to learn and grow from it?” David also explains how to “take baby steps actions in response to events”, thus shifting from drama to empowerment.

He explains his own situation of responding to the health crisis of a diagnosis of Type 2 Diabetes. For him and many others, a common reaction to a crisis includes five stages called SARAH: Shock, Anger, Rejection, Acceptance, and Help. His book was written to be a resource for family and friends of someone who lives with any chronic illness. Tune in to learn how to improve your own health outcomes by using The Empowerment Dynamic, not only for Diabetes, but any challenging situation or crisis. For more information, please visit: http://powerofted.com/

Michael Addis, PhD, is author of Invisible Men: Men’s Inner Lives and the Consequences of Silence. He says that many men have emotional and often physical pain that is often hidden because of cultural pressures that men feel. Although his interest in the invisibility of men was sparked by a specific experience that he observed, much of his work is based upon research done on the psychology of men. Dr. Addis shares some of the statistical differences between men and women including how men have much smaller social networks than women, thus have less support. Men are half as likely as women to be diagnosed with depression or anxiety yet are much more prone to take their own life. Men are less likely to recognize when they need help for emotional issues. Physicians ask men fewer questions than they do of women. Cultural stereotypes also come into play, including how most men feel they must be able to control their emotions so they don’t feel comfortable expressing them. Dr. Addis and host Mary Treacy O’Keefe discuss some specific ways for creating a more supportive environment for the men in people’s lives. For example, women need to stop being emotional caretakers of men as it’s not good for either the man or women. Some ways to be more present to men include respecting the man’s difficulty in talking but let him know you are available if needed. Timing is also important. His book gives specific ideas for helping men become less ‘invisible.’ For more information, please visit http://tinyurl.com/9p385rs .

Heidi Thompson, author of Calm Focus Joy: The Power of Breath Awareness – A Practical Guide for Adults and Children, speaks passionately about a simple, yet highly effective focus-training and stress-reducing exercise called breath awareness. Breath awareness is one of the simplest and most effective focus training and mind-developing exercises available today. It is proven to promote brain growth, improve learning, increase focus, reduce stress, and develop empathy. Adults and children who practice regularly gain an abundance of self-knowledge and insight into their amazing mind/body phenomenon. Most everyone who practices feels more peaceful and happy. She discusses how this technique differs from other meditation techniques and the benefits of using it. She provides a simple exercise for using the breath awareness technique. For more information, please visit http://www.calmfocusjoy.com

Dr. Carolyn Dean, a medical doctor and naturopath, is author/co-author of 29 health books. She discusses how up to 90% of health issues are stress related. Magnesium, the ‘anti-stress supplement,’ influences overall health of our mind, emotions and bodies. Lack of this important mineral contributes to heart problems. low energy, and many other serious health issues. Symptoms of magnesium deficiency include anxiety, depression, and being cold. Dr. Dean discusses how traditional western medicine often doesn’t know how to treat magnesium deficiencies. She also recommends other supplements to help treat various ailments. For more information, please visit www.nutritionalmagnesium.org or www.drcarolyndean.com.

Former RN, Hospice Chaplain and author Becki Hawkins discusses her new book Transitions: A Nurse’s Education about Life and Death. She first explains how she began her nursing career by working with cancer patients. Then Becki discusses the importance of being a compassionate listening presence to both oncology patients and to those living with terminal illnesses. It’s important for her to take good care of her self while caring for others. She prays and meditates, spends time in nature, has good boundaries in order to be truly present to her patients. Becki shares several inspiring stories from her book that show how the terminally ill can teach us how to live as fully as possible. For more information, please visit www.ladyhawkpublishing.com.

This show will be helpful to anyone who has been diagnosed with cancer, either recently or years ago. Denise Messenger survived stage four leukemia and breast cancer and now is committed to providing invaluable information in her book, Got Cancer, Now What? She describes her own reaction to being told she had cancer, including getting rid of all chemicals and changing a more healthy diet and life. The importance of being comfortable with treatments is stressed, along with exploring possible side effects and long term survival rates. Denise’s journey provides hope to anyone who lives with a life-threatening illness. She shares some of the research and tips that she found most beneficial when she was sick. For more information, please visit www.gotcancernowwhat.com

Kristen K. Brown is a celebrity stress coach, bestselling author, creator of The Happy Hour Effect, and blogger on http://widowmommy.wordpress.com/. As a new mom, Kristen was devastated when her 30 year-old husband died suddenly of a heart attack. Two weeks later, her job became increasingly stressful. Her stress was manifested in various physical illnesses. Rather than wanting to become overly medicated, Kristen sought a holistic solution to her challenging situation. She decided to help others as well as herself to reduce stress and anxiety by starting her company, The Happy Hour Effect. She also shares how she coped with her grief and stress in her first book, The Best Worst Thing. In it, she describes how the ‘worst thing’–tragically losing her husband—became the ‘best thing’ when she “woke up” and became more able to cherish her relationships, especially with her young daughter.

Kristin is now dedicated to helping others cope more effectively with stress, anxiety and grief in their own lives. Her business, The Happy Hour Effect, provides the opportunity for sharing her knowledge of various stress-reduction techniques. For example, she describes various stress indicators, including the ‘stress uglies’ which cause women to age more quickly, via wrinkling, sagging, acne and other skin conditions, plus weight gain caused in part by caring less about one’s appearance. It’s important to pay attention to the early symptoms of stress so they can be dealt with before too much damage is done.

Kristen shares a couple of techniques including singing loudly, which helps the body relax and release endorphins. Eating dark chocolate, which is filled with antioxidants, helps protect damage to cells by stress. She also discusses some of her favorite self-pampering techniques along with advocating for work/life harmony, where we prioritize what’s really important to focus on. For more information, please visit www.thehappyhoureffect.com

Heidi Dupree is a holistic nurse, naturopath and author of a forthcoming book, The Other Medicine that Really Works: How Energy Medicine Can Help You Heal in Mind, Body and Spirit. Heidi experienced many serious health issues including infertility, that weren’t healing from traditional Western medicine. So she learned several energy medicine techniques to help herself heal. Energy medicine includes cranio-sacral therapy, holistic nutrition, meditation, chiropractic and Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), Healing Touch, Therapeutic Touch and many other therapies. Rather that biochemical drugs, which control symptoms, energy medicine gets at the root of a health condition. Heidi gives an example of how she might help someone who suffers from chronic fatigue. She first is guided by her intuition to ask questions, then listens to the words a person uses to describe their symptoms. After doing an assessment, she’ll use several techniques to unblock energy,

Heidi discusses the impact of stress on people from a mental, emotional and spiritual standpoint. She shares ideas about how to overcome stress and foster healing. Often the first step is recognizing how our beliefs are based upon past experiences and how we respond to them. We can’t always eliminate stress but can learn how to cope with it and look for opportunities within it. She shares an EFT technique which evokes an energy response to help improve self-acceptance and fosters healing. For more information, please visit www.heididupree.com.

Mary Casey and Shannon Murphy Robinson, co-founders of BrainSkills@Work, discuss how to optimize our brain power to create sustained positive change. personal effectiveness, professional development and transformation. There are ways that the brain work for us and against us. The brain is wired around two main goals, speed and efficiency, and is designed around “patterns and maps” which help up us achieve those goals. The more we do something, like repeating an action, behavior or thought, the more we create a neuropathway in the brain that becomes the quick easy path the brain follows. Our habitual ways of doing things become the map for the brain so on its own, it doesn’t know what to do to make long term changse. We create a physical pathway in the brain every time we practice something. When we develop new habits, the brain ‘works against us’ as it resists the unfamiliar new actions and we begin to doubt ourselves and can develop negative thinking. The brain gets stuck and that affects how we think of ourselves, with the brain looking for confirming evidence of those negative thoughts. We think these thoughts are true but it’s only because the brain resists the new thinking. Mary and Shannon encourage people to get out of the limbic brain state and move into the neocortex state. There are several ways to move the brain into the higher, neocortex state. When we set an intention for what we want to change, like health and vitality, the brain helps us understand the gap between intention and action. Neuroplasticity means the brain is ‘plastic’ and it is dynamic and constantly changing. So the good news is that we can rewire pathways to create new habits. We can access higher brain states with more focused attention and repetition and an awareness of what brain states we are in. Then we can make changes if necessary to make shifts in behavior.

Our guests define the various brain states, which are the way brain responds, including the the reptilian brain, the limbic area and the neocortex. The reptilian brain is the basic responses we have to events in our lives. The limbic system is where the emotions are centered, operating just under the surface of the brain. Here we can be more vulnerable as it’s where the brain is looking for threats and it will react to perceived threats.

In the neocortex lies our ability to transform our thinking out of limiting thoughts and unconscious habits that make it difficult to make positive change. The goal is to enable people to operate more out of the neocortex state. For transformational thinking, we are in the highest, neocortex brain stage where we can shift how we see ourselves and the world around us. Mary and Shannon give an example of how to access the higher brain state where we can make and sustain long-term change. For more information, please visit http://www.brainskillsatwork.com.

NOTE: Mary Casey and Shannon Murphy Robinson will be speaking on July 26 at the Summer Leadership program at the University of St. Catherine in St. Paul about Neuroscience Meets Leadership.

Jeffry Jeanetta-Wark, is a holistic psychotherapist who uses an eclectic approach to helping his patients at his Center for Integrative Wellbeing. Jeffry first defines what it means to be a holistic or integrated psychotherapist who brings together an awareness of the mind, in connection to the body, emotions and spirit. It also focuses on energy in reference to mental healthcare. He describes some holistic techniques including Thought Field Therapy and Emotional Freedom Techniques, two tapping techniques that helps someone deal with painful memories, and reduce the discomfort of distressing emotions and a variety of other health issues. Other stress management skills he teaches people include breathing techniques, diaphramic deep breathing, heart rate monitoring, and reframing thinking to calm down. Shamanism is explained as a helpful practice for healing using herbs, nature, energy and the universe He gives an example of how a person can bring intention and ritual into her healing process. Totems are animal spirits who can help people. One of Jeffry’s special areas of expertise is working with adolescent males including through the use of stories and archetypes. He shares information about the Integrative Healer’s Consortium which meets monthly in the Twin Cities.